NXG03-4: XCP-i : eXplicit Control Protocol for Heterogeneous Inter-Networking of High-Speed Networks

XCP is a transport protocol that uses the assistance of specialized routers to very accurately determine the available bandwidth along the path from the source to the destination. In this way, XCP efficiently controls the sender's congestion window size thus avoiding the traditional slow-start and congestion avoidance phase. However, XCP requires the collaboration of all the routers on the data path which is almost impossible to achieve in an incremental deployment scenario of XCP. It has been shown that XCP behaves badly, worse than TCP, in the presence of non-XCP routers thus limiting dramatically the benefit of having XCP running in some parts of the network. In this paper, we address this problem and propose XCP-i which is operable on an internetwork consisting of XCP routers and traditional IP routers without loosing the benefit of the XCP control laws. The simulation results on a number of topologies that reflect the various scenario of incremental deployment on the Internet show that although XCP-i performances depend on available bandwidth estimation accuracy, XCP-i still outperforms TCP on high-speed links.